TRENDING

By GCN Staff

GSA shuts down apps.gov

On Dec. 1, the General Services Administration shuttered apps.gov, the one-stop cloud portal championed by the former federal CIO, Vivek Kundra.

Apps.gov was designed as an online storefront of cloud-based services from which agencies could "get the capabilities they need to fulfill their missions at lower cost, faster, and ultimately, in a more sustainable manner," Kundra wrote in a blog post announcing the site.

GSA decommissioned the three-year-old site in an effort to streamline customer service and simplify its consumer-facing websites, according to FCW. GSA said the move is to adjust its services to suit agency needs.

According to the announcement as reported by govroot, GSA said the apps.gov website will no longer host SaaS vendors or other cloud service providers. These offerings instead would be available through the vendors' respective IT Schedule 70 contracts on GSA Advantage. Other apps.gov services, such as social media applications, would be available on howto.gov, GSA's website for managers of government service channels.

FCW reported that in 2010, Katie Lewin, chief of staff at the Office of the Chief Information Officer at GSA, said government users were not buying from apps.gov. They were using the site to do research and check prices, with "prospective buyers presumably using that information to help structure their own cloud computing buys."

Traffic and links to Apps.gov are being redirected to info.apps.gov, the home of the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative.